LOPSA Mentorship Program Cuts First Teeth

That’s right the Mentorship Program is turning 1. Like any youngster we’re still learning our place in the world. We have had growing pains but we still have a bright future. In the past year we have had three program chairs Jesse Trucks, Ian Parades, and Thomas Leyer (current chair). The core team consists of Lois Bennett, Thomas Leyer and me. I’d like to share some statistics with you.

Projects initiated: 15

Projects in progress: 8

Projects successfully completed: 4

The most popular topics have been monitoring, backups, and configuration management.

As you can see we have a fairly high attrition rate, but that is to be expected as many in our community have highly interrupted and changing schedules, not to mention the typical life events (babies, job changes, family, etc …).

This coming year we plan to continue to grow the program. We would like to get more volunteers involved with both mentoring and the core team.

We plan to start soliciting donations (mostly educational related books, trainings, etc ..) for the program that can be used as incentives for participants. So this is the first public call for donations. If you think that cultivating knowledge sharing between system administrators is important and valuable. If you think that your company produces a great product or has a great service that system administrators are interested in and can benefit from. If helping others gives you a warm fuzzy feeling inside and if your in a position to donate, influence someone to donate, or just know who we should ask I am talking to you.

We are looking for books, trainings, product, or anything that will align with our program participants interests and assist them in their professional growth. We’ll take cash too, maybe we can use it to fund passage to a conference or a training :). Even if you can give us contact information of people to talk to further that would be a great help.

I’d like to give special thanks to the previous program chairs, and especially to Thomas, its a lot of work and we appreciate all that you do and have done.